Career Opportunities
Interested in joining Lero as a student, researcher or academic?
Studying and working with Lero offers a wealth of possibilities both within Lero and across Ireland’s higher education institutes. It can lead to careers with some of the finest universities in the world and with top global companies. We have collected stories from some of the remarkable researchers who have helped to make Lero so successful and who are at the cutting edge of software research in Ireland and internationally. Learn about where Lero has led them, and where it could take you, by visiting the Lero stories section of our website.
Calls and positions are advertised on this page and on Lero’s Social Media but Lero is always open to approaches from excellent candidates. If you are interested in working with one of Lero’s world-class researchers, you can email the relevant person directly at any time with an expression of interest and your CV. Information about Lero members, their research, their universities and their contact details are available on the Meet the Team section of the Lero website. We look forward to hearing from you.
TITLE OF POST: PhD Opportunity in Computer Science – SimuLimb Project
LOCATION: University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Supervisors
Prof Tiziana Margaria (University of Limerick)
In cooperation with Dr. Kevin Moerman (NUIG)
DESCRIPTION
We offer an opportunity to join the exciting SimuLimb project in an interdisciplinary collaboration between Dr. Kevin Moerman (Biomedical Engineering, NUIG) and Prof. Tiziana Margaria (Computer Science, UL). The SimuLimb project aims to create, deploy, and clinically evaluate an open-source computational framework for automated prosthetic socket design.
Funded by the Science Foundation Ireland Lero Research Centre, this project is located at the nexus of digital and biomedical design, with a strong reliance on advanced model driven development technologies and data science support. You will work as part of the multidisciplinary SimuLimb team drawn from the specialties of Biomedical Engineering as well as Computer Science. The specific position offers research, design and development responsibilities covering the Computer Science and Software aspects within the SimuLimb project, under the supervision of Prof. Margaria in UL.
Your role will cover research, software system design and development as needed to build a new generation of design, development and analytics platform for the design and evaluation of prosthetic sockets. The new platform needs to be robust and easily evolvable, so that it can include, over time, all the services needed for modern and future customization, evolution, analysis and refinement. It is an open-source open access platform, as we address among other goals also the ease of access and adoption, and the democratization of complex application development, lowering the barriers to access, adoption and proficiency. The platform will provide interfaces to the devices and facilitate the design of applications for the design and evaluation of the prosthetic sockets in a low-code approach enhanced by rigorous analysis and verification methods.
The successful candidate will additionally be affiliated with Lero – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software. Lero brings together expert software teams from universities and institutes of technology across Ireland in a co-ordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus.
Full Details
Full Details are available here
TITLE OF POST: PhD Position: Ethics and Trustworthiness of Algorithmic Decision making Systems in the Public Sector
LOCATION: Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
BACKGROUND
Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, brings together expert software teams from universities and institutes of technology across Ireland in a co-ordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus. Lero’s research spans a wide range of application domains from driverless cars to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, fintech, govtech, smart communities, agtech and healthtech. Lero’s overall vision is to establish Ireland as a location synonymous with high-quality software research and development, to the extent that ‘Irish software’can enter the lexicon in the same way as ‘German automotive’ or ‘Scandinavian design’. Since it was founded in 2005, Lero has become one of the best-known, and most highly regarded, software research centres in the world.
RESEARCH CONTEXT
Algorithmic Decision-making Systems (ADS) are increasingly pervasive and are revolutionising services across different industries and the public sector. The challenges and issues associated with ADS deployment in high stake contexts are increasingly discussed in scholarly outlets. These include the need to increase efficiency, reduce potential harm, as well as promote fairness, equity, accountability and transparency in decision making. Understanding how trust in ADS can be generated so as to increase more broad-based adoption is an issue of interest to scholars and practitioners alike. It is particularly important in relation to the public sector, as ADS may actually entrench, amplify and even obscure human bias and discrimination in decision processes -something that underpins public concerns and reduces trust.
PhD OBJECTIVE
The goal of this PhD thesis is to investigate the trust-related factors that influence acceptance and adoption of ADS within different public sector situational contexts. It will provide important insights into the dynamics of trust generation in ADS and will contribute theoretical and conceptual foundations that support development of ethical ADS in public sector contexts.
Full Details
Full Details are available here
TITLE OF POST: Master by Research Opportunities in Digital Health – DHP-Transform Project
LOCATION: Dublin City University, Ireland
Description
We offer students an opportunity to join the exciting DHP-Transform project in an interdisciplinary collaboration among University of Limerick (UL), National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), Maynooth University (MU), and Dublin City University (DCU). The DHP-Transform project aims to design, develop and evaluate a model for digital health transformation (DHT). As DHT is not a straightforward application of digital technologies to healthcare, the healthcare process needs to be restructured. DHT influences behaviour, care pathways, and processes, causing stakeholders and technologies to co-operate in novel ways.
Full Details
Full Details are available here
TITLE OF POST: Post Doctoral Researcher in Omnidirectional Computer Vision and Machine Learning
LOCATION: University of Limerick, Ireland
Description
The successful candidate will be a senior team member within Lero projects FisheyeCam/RadNet.
The candidate will work on computer vision solutions for the vehicle automation industry. The overarching goals of the projects are:
- To investigate the effect of camera production tolerances on the performance of automotive vision algorithms.
- To adapt neural networks to work effectively on surround view automotive cameras.
- To perform pedestrian detection, tracking and prediction using surround automotive vision and radar data.
The successful candidate will be a key researcher in the projects and will work under the guidance of the Principal Investigators at the University of Limerick and in close collaboration with our industrial partners. The successful candidate will take responsibility for day-to-day management of the projects and will contribute actively to implementing the projects’ outputs, as well as supervising other staff (PhD students) in close collaboration with the Principal Investigators.
Full Details
Full Details are available here (search all vacancy types).
TITLE OF POST: Post Doctoral Researcher in Software Engineering for AI
LOCATION: University of Limerick, Ireland
Overall purpose of the job:
The position will investigate the design and development of techniques, tools, and exemplars for specifying and satisfying requirements for Machine Learning (ML) applications grounded in formal methods and informed by software engineering practice. The aim is to strengthen engineering practices and improve the way ML applications are developed and deployed.
The post holder will work closely with project investigator Prof Bashar Nuseibeh, Research Fellow, research software engineers, and other postdoctoral researchers in the research team advising on software development solutions and promoting responsible research software engineering practices.
Full Details
Full Details are available here.
Deadline
6th October 2022.
TITLE OF POST: Research AI Software Engineer
LOCATION: University of Limerick, Ireland
Overall purpose of the job:
- Develop exemplars in the domain of autonomous driving.
- Build prototypes to validate the research for requirements modelling and validation.
- Work collaboratively with members of the research team to produce a series of high-quality academic publications and open-source prototypes.
- Contribute to the research culture and activities of the wider research group. There is an expectation that this position will actively contribute to the strong profile of the group and its inter-disciplinary ethos through participation in the development and publication of research results.
Full Details
Full Details are available here.
Deadline
5th October 2022.
TITLE OF POST: PhD – Tangible and physical computing for people with ASD
LOCATION: University of Limerick, Ireland
Description:
The project aims at identifying the role of tangible and physical computing in autism early intervention through the augmentation of physical objects and toys with computational and communicational capabilities. The overall research question is: How can we augment physical objects and toys with computational and communicational capabilities to support autism early intervention?
This project is critical of the growing enthusiasm and application of touch-screens and screen-based interaction in various educational settings including early interventions in autism, and it argues for an approach to computing and interactive technology that augments physical objects and environments to better suit the expressiveness and richness of human interaction with the physical world.
The project intends to open up untapped possibilities to better suit the needs and the strengths of autistic children in both educational and domestic settings, and equip them and their carers with physical tools that could better support, for instance,sensory integration, regulation, fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, joint attention, language, social skills, etc.
Full Details
Full Details are available here.
Application End Date
Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Interviews will be carried out as soon as a suitable candidate is identified.
TITLE OF POST: PhD – Design and evaluation of AR/VR applications
LOCATION: University of Limerick, Ireland
PROJECT: Virtual Reality fostering inclusive and sustainable Industry 4.0
Description:
The goal of this research is to study the impact of Virtual Reality (VR) applications for higher education and manufacturing, particularly for frequent use and high demand applications i.e. health and safety training, remote maintenance or repair. Following a user-centred approach, these will benefit of reduced culturally induced bias and improved learning outcomes. Studies conducted in this project will focus on A) usability and B) impact assessment, contributing to
- design, develop and explore augmented or VRapplications in manufacturing, to be tested with users from industry partners as well as higher education;
- generate and disseminate training applications and design guidelines for future work;
- estimate the social, economic (e.g., workplace diversity & inclusion) and potential environmental impact (e.g., carbon emissions) comparing the existing to interactive digital alternatives (e.g., immersive CAVE vs headsets)
Full Details
Full Details are available here.
Application End Date
Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Shortlisted candidates will be called for interview in January 2023.
TITLE OF POST: Postdoctoral Researcher / Research Associate (Specified Purpose Contract)
LOCATION: Department of Psychology, Maynooth University, Ireland
Description:
Maynooth University are seeking to recruit a postdoctoral researcher (or research associate with exceptionally, equivalent research experience) to join a project funded by Science Foundation Ireland to investigate the relationship between language models and people’s attitudes. The project is run jointly by Dr. Dermot Lynott (Department of Psychology) and Dr. Diarmuid O’Donoghue (Department of Computer Science).
The project involves interdisciplinary research drawing on areas of machine learning, corpus linguistics, experimental psychology, social cognition, and cognitive modelling, in order to examine how language experience may be related to the formation and development of people’s attitudes (e.g., such as those relating to age, race, gender, etc.).
For this post, the researcher will use large language models (e.g., Word2vec, GloVe, BERT etc.) to evaluate how well such models can capture human behaviour (using existing and new behavioural data). The researcher will work as part of the project team (alongside a PhD student, also to be appointed) contributing to the design of behavioural studies to test model predictions. Finally, the researcher will work on combining state-of-the art modelling work, with behavioural findings, to develop digital tools to aid researchers, authors and citizens in identifying and understanding implicit bias in language. The researcher will also have the opportunity for collaborating with our partners (TextureAI), including the possibility of short research placements.
The successful candidate will be required to train, test, and evaluate computational models (comparing their performance against human behaviour), develop online tools, contribute to the design of online empirical studies, carry out data analysis, collaborate with other members of the research team, and contribute to conference dissemination and writing papers for publication.
The researcher will be based in the Department of Psychology, and located with other postgraduate researchers and staff working on externally funded research projects.
Full Details & Application Instructions
Full Details are available here.
TITLE OF POST: PhD Opportunity in Computer Science – Blockchain Technology (Lero)
LOCATION: University of Limerick, Ireland
Supervisors: Dr Jim Buckley, Dr Chris Exton, Dr Andrew LeGear
Description:
The democratising properties of blockchain technology have the potential to disrupt and transform entire industries globally. Diverse applications include currency transactions, hospital record keeping, contract enforcement and public land registry. It’s distributed nature in removing trusted central authorities holds the potential for removing the need for costly 3rd party brokerage of transactions. For example, when combined with Horizon Globex’s patented smart packet VoIP infrastructure this research holds the key to bringing a communication revolution through blockchain to some of the most impoverished parts of the planet. But the high-quality creation and migration of such systems (to high-quality, end products) is under researched, given the potential, transformational impact of such systems. This project addresses this shortfall, by reviewing the current literature on (Ethereum) contract quality, by reviewing migration-to-blockchain guidelines/quality research, by trialling the approaches/guidelines suggested and by evaluating these approaches/the resultant blockchain systems, via quality assessment. Funded by the Science Foundation Ireland Lero Research Centre, this project is located at the Limerick Lero offices.
The successful candidate will additionally be affiliated with Lero – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software. Lero brings together expert software teams from universities and institutes of technology across Ireland in a co-ordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus.
Application procedure:
To apply, please submit your CV to chris.exton@ul.ie for UL including the following information:
- A cover letter describing how you meet the criteria, with a description of your previous experience
- Details of at least two referees.
- Full transcript of records of your university-level studies so far.
- Previous publications or previous significant work (thesis, final year project, or similar).
Application End Date: Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.
TITLE OF POST: Master by Research Opportunities in Digital Health – DHP-Transform Project
LOCATION: Dublin City University, Ireland
Supervisors: Dr. Silvana Togneri MacMahon, Prof. Markus Helfert, Dr. Marco Alfano
Description:
We offer students an opportunity to join the exciting DHP-Transform project in an interdisciplinary collaboration among University of Limerick (UL), National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), Maynooth University (MU), and Dublin City University (DCU). The DHP-Transform project aims to design, develop and evaluate a model for digital health transformation (DHT). As DHT is not a straightforward application of digital technologies to healthcare, the healthcare process needs to be restructured. DHT influences behaviour, care pathways, and processes, causing stakeholders and technologies to co-operate in novel ways.
Full Details are available here
Application End Date: Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Interviews will be carried out as soon as a suitable candidate is identified.
TITLE OF POST: Postdoctoral Fellowship - SyMeCo
LOCATION: Lero & SyMeco Host Institutions, Ireland
Description:
This is a fantastic research, training and career development opportunity for postdoctoral researchers featuring:
- 2-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc fellowship
- Individual research project under the supervision of a leading Lero researcher
- Freedom to choose the research proposal topic provided it falls within the broad SyMeCo programme themes and the research interests of an eligible SyMeCo supervisor
- Secondment period with the non-academic or academic sector to suit your research and career advancement aspirations
- Comprehensive discipline-specific and transferable skills training and career development programme provided
- Communication training, public engagement, and outreach activities
Full Details are available here
Application End Date: 3rd of October 2023
Meet some of Lero’s current and previous researchers.


